Most households today possess multiple types of electronic consumer devices, such as televisions, stereo radios, digital video disk players, video cassette recorders, set-top cable television boxes and set-top satellite boxes. Manufacturers of such electronic devices typically supply a remote control device along with each electronic device. It is, therefore, common for a consumer who has multiple electronic devices to have multiple remote control devices.
A remote control device typically controls a selected electronic consumer device by transmitting infrared key code signals to the selected electronic consumer device. The infrared signals contain key codes of a codeset associated with the selected electronic consumer device. Each key code corresponds to a function of the selected electronic device, such as power on, power off, volume up, volume down, play, stop, select, channel up, channel down, etc. In order to avoid the situation where a remote control device unintentionally operates an electronic consumer device that is associated with a different remote control device, manufacturers sometimes use distinct codesets for the communication between various electronic consumer devices and their associated remote control devices. The codesets can differ from each other not only by the bit patterns assigned to various functions of the associated electronic consumer device, but also by the timing information that describes how the key codes should be modulated onto carrier signals to generate key code signals.
Consumers may find it inconvenient to operate their electronic devices using multiple remote control devices. Thus, a consumer may wish to operate multiple electronic consumer devices using a single remote control device. A single remote control device can store many codesets so that the remote control device can control a corresponding large number of different electronic consumer devices. There are, however, thousands of codesets in use in electronic consumer devices today. Manufacturers of remote control devices, however, may wish to limit the memory on their remote control devices to a size that is insufficient to store the thousands of existing codesets.
A system is sought for enabling a remote control device to control a selected one of multiple different electronic consumer devices without requiring the codeset associated with the selected electronic consumer device to be stored on the remote control device.